Al Purdy's Racism

 

In a piece he titled “Norma, Eunice, and Judy,” Al Purdy lamented, as I do, the general disrespect in Canada for Canadian culture. He regrets, in his own day, Canadian children growing up thinking they live in “a nation without culture, art, or literature.” It is, he says, “a country where the native literature is added to English Literature or American Literature like an afterthought. Where it is said to be not worth teaching.”

It is the colonial mentality. And, if anything, it is getting worse, with our own prime minister (eternal shame be upon him) claiming there is no Canadian culture, with government cultural funding going as a priority to “multiculturalism.” In other words, any culture but Canadian culture.

Purdy then tells the tale of Jim Foley, an unusually well-educated Ontario high school teacher who “realized that Canada must be the only country in the world where high school kids aren’t taught their own literature.” He began his own database of Canadian literature, confident that in a few years “Margaret Laurence, Atwood, Layton, Garner, and all the others who talk about the place we live in, their voices will be heard and taught in our schools.”

These words were spoken in 1974. It is now the butt end of 2022, and it still has not happened. Instead, the reverse. Kids now read American pop novels in school, watch Hollywood movies, and read and discuss anything written by anyone claiming to be aboriginal. Or failing that, they will be assigned a book by an immigrant with views hostile to the country and the culture. 

Precisely the attitude of a colonizer.

And Purdy and Foley would now be declared “racist” for wanting to promote Canadian literature.